It’s prom season!! This is one of my favorite times of the year since it means that summer is coming and that we’re almost to senior season! At least for those of us who aren’t in the south and entering their hottest time of the year. For those of you who are looking at 100+ degree temps soon… I’m sorry.

I always see this pop up as a question on Facebook photography groups, so what better topic for a blog post than my tips for how to photograph high school prom photos!

Do It By Group

One of the biggest tips that I have is to do it by group. While you can do it by individual, I found that when I personally tried to do this before it became a hassle. It became more of a stress on my calendar as people all had different prom dates, wanted to do it at certain times and sometimes didn’t work out to be beneficial from a price/time standpoint.

Doing it by groups helped tremendously! Many times there are proms all on the same day or multiple schools will have prom on the same weekends. This requires that they are all at a certain place at a certain time and sometimes don’t have time to come in for an individual shoot. However, when you do it in a group, they all have to be somewhere already and this is often much more accommodating for their schedules.

For my prom rates, I make sure that I am only booking groups of 5+ couples or charging them the same amount. The reason is that this is much more beneficial to your time and profit line. I then scale the rate per couple or charge groups that are less than the 5 couples the same as if they were a large group.

Where To Photograph the Groups

One of the first years I photographed prom groups, I decided on doing the prom groups in three different locations. I just about killed myself doing this. It was highly ineffective from a time standpoint and wasn’t as laid back as I would have liked. I was stressed about making sure I was going to get to the next place at the right time.

Now, I photograph the groups in one location. This allows me to location scout ahead of time and make sure that I am providing them with quality service. If there is a location that is really awesome and I just have to have, I will consider going there simply for the fact that I want to photograph there.

I highly recommend picking one location and scheduling the groups in time intervals in that location so that you can focus on doing it all at once in one location and not running around. This saves you time and also lets you squeeze more groups in.

Payment and  Delivery of Images

I make sure that I am always collecting payment ahead of time. The last thing that I want the day of the shoot is to be running around and trying to collect 20 different payments from each couple, remembering who paid, who didn’t and just creating a headache for myself. For each group, the person who contacts me is responsible for handling payment. I send them an invoice through Square for the full group amount and it is due 48 hours prior to their prom date. I let the individual that pays know that they’re responsible for recouping costs from their group much like if they were to book a limo service; the limo company isn’t running around collecting split payments. This eliminates me having to keep track of who hasn’t paid and tracking that individual down. I also will note that I require each person in the group to pay. If the whole group doesn’t want to be photographed, I do not take the group since I don’t want it to turn into a bigger hassle of remembering who is paying and who isn’t.

For the delivery of images, while some people may be against this, I provide them the digital images. I do this because I don’t want to deal with submitting print orders, delivering them or having people pick them up, getting the right sizes of the right shot, etc. This takes way more time and isn’t cost effective for me personally. In the past when I had online galleries that accommodated online ordering and drop shipping, this was a great way to do this, but I don’t now and don’t worry about this. If you do have access to an online gallery that allows your clients to order the images, I would recommend enabling this feature since any additional print sales wouldn’t have to be fulfilled by you manually and would just increase your profit.

Those are just a few of my tips about prom photography and how I do it! As with anything, there are a million ways to do the same thing and this is simply what works for me. I hope that you have a couple takeaways from this and that it helps you structure your prom shoots more profitably and efficiently!